I'm not sold on this method of literary analysis. But I think it's a much healthier approach than the "media as didactic" lens that so many people in the modern world have unwittingly adopted. Fictional worlds and characters CAN be subject to scrutiny. This is a healthier lens.

Humans do not behave arbitrarily or without reason. We behave according to knowable laws. Therefore, even fictional beings should behave according to knowable laws. How closely they adhere to those laws should be at least one barometer by which we gauge the "truth" of a narrative.

Basically, he's saying that since the affairs of man are subject to laws which are scrutable, history should follow those laws insofar as they are known. And likewise, extrapolates this to fictional narratives.

I also think that Trotsky's contemporary idea of "hardness" in science & history differs a bit from our own, and really is more akin to "objective" as opposed to the histories of, say, Herodotus or Strabo.

Not to say that sciences don't require interpretation at all. Science is a sociological exercise rendering the physical world comprehensible to humans. But historical interpretation requires guessing, value judgments, and other mechanisms that are superfluous in most sciences.

First, I don't much care for the hard scientism of that era of Marxists when it comes to the examination of history, as history is more than a collection of verifiable numbers, and requires interpretation - in a way that, say, biology does not.

Which in turn fuels ideas for the next video. Editing is exhausting but it helps me grow not just the craft of editing but also my ideas as a creator.

I’m still growing as a content creator, and one thing I didn’t really anticipate was how the editing process would cause me to further develop my ideas. I start debating the self of a few hours or days ago.